When a 79-year-old Comcast customer accidentally included her rent check with her Comcast bill, not only did the cable company cash the check — which was more than 10 times the amount of her bill and was made out to someone else — but it also refused to issue her a refund when it acknowledged the goof.
Instead, the woman tells KRQE-TV, Comcast offered to credit her the $235 rent check to her account. Since her monthly cable bill is only $20.69, that amounts to more than 11 months of service.
But that won’t help the elderly customer on a fixed income who had to scrape together another $235 to make her rent payment.
A rep for Comcast explained to KRQE that this happened because no humans at Comcast actually look at the checks they receive. The payments are just processed automatically. She admitted that similar mistakes have occurred before but claims the company has remedied those situations quickly.
Of course that doesn’t explain why that didn’t happen in this case or why Comcast — which can afford to spend $45 billion to acquire 10 million Time Warner Cable customers — couldn’t simply send the customer a check for $235.
Comcast says it has reached out to the customer to apologize and rectify the situation. The company is also planning to talk to the employee who told the customer she couldn’t get a refund.
Hey, at least that employee didn’t change her name to “A**hole.”
In the end — and once again, only after the media got involved — Comcast issued the customer a refund check and kept the $235 credit on her bill.
Maybe the customer should have just called the Comcast CEO’s mom.
Couldn’t Comcast be in legal trouble for cashing a check that was most definitely not made out to them? It was sent to them, but it still was not theirs to cash, just as finding something in public does not make it legally yours. If my company mails me my CEO’s paycheck, you can bet that, if I deposit it, I will have to return that money.
Not only return the money but as I understand it, check fraud is a federal offense. The only likely way they’re getting off the hook is because it’s an automated process, corrected when found, eventually…
Let’s be clear here. According to the story:
1) The woman wrote out a check for her Comcast bill and put it into the Comcast envelope.
2) The woman *also* mistakenly put her rent check into the same envelope.
Comcast cashed *both* checks, and refused to return the amount from the incorrect check, even when it was pointed out to them. Instead, they chose to credit her bill 11 months in advance. Only after when the media got involved did Comcast return the money.
Is that about it? Can someone find her a quality pro bono lawyer?
Hey, Consumerist, has Comcast earned enough stupid points in the past year to automatically make it into this year’s Worst Company In America?